The present invention relates to apparatuses and methods for enabling improved display of textual content on an electronic display.
Communications devices, including PCs, smartphones, tablets, e-readers, etc. continue to grow in popularity, and have become an integral part of both personal and business communications. As a result, users continue to spend more time using their communications devices during the course of a day reading e-mails, reading web sites, sending short message service (SMS) messages, etc. The use of a communications device, and particularly a mobile communications device, for such functions, however, may present certain inconveniences to a user. For example, the display area of a mobile communications device may be limited, which may increase the time spent reading an e-mail or web site, as the user may have to scroll through multiple pages to read the entire e-mail or web site. Moreover, despite heavy technological (digital) advances, the illustration of textual information on electronic displays has not fundamentally changed. Textual information is typically displayed in lines such that the reader's eye moves sequentially from word to word.
Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) is a method of displaying textual content in which each word of the textual content is displayed in sequential order, one at a time, at a certain display rate, at a fixed location on a display. RSVP was first introduced in the 1970s as a technique for presenting text one word at a time in a display. Many references since then have provided information on the use of RSVP in a variety of applications. Commercially available products based on RSVP include “Zap Reader” (www.zapreader.com/reader) and “Spreeder” (www.spreeder.com). Some prior methods exist for improving the effectiveness of an RSVP by varying the display time of a word in the display based on word length and word type (see, U.S. Pat. No. 6,130,968 to McIan et al. (“McIan”)) and based on word frequency (see WO/37256 by Goldstein et al. (“Goldstein 2002”)). While these techniques are beneficial in improving comprehension of the displayed text, new techniques and methods are needed to further increase a user's reading speed, and improve the presentation of dense content on electronic displays.
Isolated efforts have also been made to apply RSVP to particular applications (e.g., email application) in mobile communications devices (see, US 2011/0115819 to Hanson). However, the challenges and opportunities for integrating RSVP into user interfaces for increasing the density of displayable content remain largely unexplored.